Preparing wall to paint after stripping wallpaper

[VegemiteSandwich]

Hi!

We plan to strip the wallpaper in my son's room and paint it instead.

My son and husband have been amusing themselves at bedtime by pulling bits of it off. This means that a) it no longer looks horribly unfashionable, it just looks horrible - sorting out this room has become a priority - and b) I can see what's underneath it now.

Underneath the paper is ... nothing! Plasterboard I guess. Which means that the walls must have been papered when the house was built 20 years ago.

So, my question is: what is the very best way to prepare the walls for painting? I'm aware that this may bring up a PVA or not-to-PVA type question. Will the old wallpaper glue effect what I'm doing?

 

[rjm2k]

get the paper off, wash down with a decorating sponge and sugar soap, fill any holes with pollyfilla. I then use the BaseCoat product and then paint.

 

[VegemiteSandwich]

Base coat? As in polycell basecoat? I've not heard of that before but have just googled it. Sounds too good to be true (wish id have tried it on the ****ty old walls in our last house!).

So slapping on a mist coat wouldn't be good enough?

Sugar soap and a sponge is I think the missing step I was after, thanks!

 

[rjm2k]

some people just a mist coat, I tend to use basecoat because it's a bit thicker so it's supposed to help block colour, fill in minor cracks and smooth the surface a little but it's really optional. let's face it, once you've taken the paper off prepped and painted it will be much easier in future

once you've used the sugar soap it may be worth going over again just with a clean wet sponge

 

[VegemiteSandwich]

It sounds like an interesting product and might be fun to experiment. And let's face it, there's a reasonable chance I'll get fed up of patiently stripping paper and just start scraping the walls instead!!

 

[dcdec]

Far easier to put a coat of gardz on. Strip (removing as much paste as you can while you go), fill, rub down, gardz, paint. The gardz neutralises any paste residue, hardens up the p/board, primes the filler and evens the porosity of the wall.

 

[VegemiteSandwich]

I thought I'd pop back to say I've finished the project, and thanks for the tips.

Unfortunately I've only just seen the gardz suggestion, which is a shame as I used another zissner product - BIN spray - on the dado rail and got on well with it.

Anyway, I sugar soaped, "rinsed" with water, put on a coat of dulux basecoat - which was a bit of a bastard to apply but seemed to hold well - and a couple do topcoats. I'm pretty pleased with the results!